Dell Offering InfiniBand Capabilities

Dell Inc. is bringing InfiniBand capabilities to its high-performance computing cluster configurations via technology from Topspin Communications Inc.
The addition of InfiniBand switches is a continuation of Dells drive to offer industry-standard technology to its customers, said Victor Mashayekhi, development manager for Dells HPC initiatives.
"[InfiniBand] gives us that opportunity to give customers a standardized solution at a very good cost," Mashayekhi, in Round Rock, Texas, said in an interview Tuesday.

Dell bundles hardware, software and services into its HPC cluster configurations, which scale from eight to 128 nodes. Mashayekhi said the 64-node configuration will come bundled with InfiniBand, although the company can include the low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect with the 128-node cluster if requested, he said. The 24-node configuration also will come bundled with InfiniBand, and Topspins switches will be added to configurations for Oracle Corp.s 10Gg platform later this year.

Currently Dell offers the higher cluster with either Gigabit Ethernet, Fast Ethernet or Myrinet from Myricom Inc.
The InfiniBand configurations, supporting Red Hat Inc.s Enterprise Linux operating system, will start shipping later this quarter.
Topspin, of Mountain View, Calif., has entered into agreements with other OEMs, including IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. The company makes switches and adapters designed to integrate the high-bandwidth, low-latency technology into data centers.
Topspin and other InfiniBand vendors offer products with throughput speeds of 10G-bps switches, and have said 30G-bps switches will start coming out later this year.